


The End of the Cold War

by Zhelana



Category: seaQuest
Genre: Gen, Military
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 04:11:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9367358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zhelana/pseuds/Zhelana
Summary: The seaQuest finds themselves helping counterrevolutionaries in Cuba, the last socialist country on earth.





	

The movie stopped mid sentence. Thor and Iron Man were in the midst of arguing over who was stronger when suddenly the entire room went black. Most people remained seated to see if it was just a temporary glitch, after all such things happened frequently in Cuba. Maybe the film would come back quickly. Before anyone started to panic, the voice of the theater manager came over the loudspeakers.   
“It is my sad duty to inform you that Raul Castro, first citizen of our great nation, has died.” Then there was silence, and a second later, the overhead lights came on clearly indicating that the movie would not resume. Along with a few other strangers, Angela let out a cheer. Her father, Benjamin, quieted her.   
“Now we fight. We win or lose everything this week. But whether we win or lose we will lose many good people, and it is not a time for cheering.” She cocked an eyebrow at him. Was he admitting what she thought he was admitting? It was possible, and she had always suspected, but he had never confirmed it before. Was the government right when it arrested him all those years ago? It seemed more likely now than it had five minutes ago.   
He ushered her out of the movie theater along with everybody else. They walked along the side of the ocean towards the docks. A sign read, “do not walk on wall,” but tonight, there seemed to be an endless sea of bodies walking on the wall, pissing over the side of it into the ocean, or just throwing empty beer bottles at it, occasionally hitting the people standing on it. They walked past one of the poorer neighborhoods of Cuba, and they could see exactly what Benjamin had always hoped they would see when this day finally came. There were fires burning, and people mobbing the streets walking towards the city center only two blocks away. Some were walking with molotov cocktails and stun guns. The long oppressed people of Cuba meant to fight; they meant to take back their country for the first time since the Cuban Revolution. They would not allow the Raul Castro approved replacement to take control without killing or arresting every last one of them. Of course, it was possible the government would do exactly that. It was certainly not unheard of for them to arrest the poor at random, never mind for leading an insurrection. However, they were hoping that the UEO wouldn’t allow such antics this time. There had been no UEO when Fidel Castro had finally died. Certainly the UEO wanted Cuba to be liberated, and join them, as most other nations around the world had done. Cuba had a small military, but it was one of the strongest non-aligned nations in the world. Of course, it was nothing compared to the might of the UEO, but the UEO was not in the business of forcing states to join them unless asked.   
“We should join them,” Angela started walking towards the mobs.   
“No. We have a much more important job. We have to send an SOS to the UEO. Then we will fight” Benjamin steered her towards the docks.   
About twenty years before, the docks had been set up for cruise ships, primarily for taking European visitors to Havana. Since the advent of undersea colonies in 2000, it had been completely retrofitted to maintain submarines. Cuba had no colonies, but they had a fair-sized navy, and private submarines had been using the port to dock to bring tourists ever since tensions had started to ease between Cuba and the United States in 2016. Benjamin and Angela made their way to one of these private submarines now. At the hatch, a suspicious man with a crew cut challenged him, “how do you feel about American politics?” he asked.   
“Donald Trump is not my president,” Benjamin responded.   
“And Russia?”   
“Putin on a Ritz,” came the reply.   
The young man visibly relaxed as he opened the door. “Thank God you’re okay. You’re the last one to get here,” he told him.   
“We had walked to a movie theater. Didn’t have a car,” Benjamin replied and the three counterrevolutionaries walked towards the bridge. Benjamin took his position in the Captain’s chair while Angela looked at him, shocked. She had guessed he might be a counterrevolutionary but she had never guessed that he might actually be an important one. The captain’s chair certainly meant he was the leader of at least this bunch of people. He looked at her and then told her to go to the captains quarters where she could make herself at home and get online. He couldn’t be worried about his daughter now. He had important business to do.   
“Mister Cruz,” he said to the man at the communications station, “get me the UEO.”   
“Yes, sir,” the man answered, and then put on a headset and started pushing buttons.   
Eventually, the garbled voice of LTJG Tim O’Neil came over the radio speaking fluent Spanish.   
“Cuba is having a revolution,” Cruz told him, “and the government will violently attack the revolutionaries without your immediate aid. We are prepared to join the UEO if you help us put control of our country back in the hands of the people.”   
Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries sounded a lot alike if you thought about it, even though they had opposite goals. The Communist Revolutionaries would use much of the same wording but of course when they said it, it never turned out with power going to the people. Power always went to an elite few while the masses suffered. It had been that way since the first communist revolution in 1919, and it remained that way in Cuba, the last genuine socialist country in the world. Of course, the counterrevolutionaries also wanted control to the people, but they were more literal about it, wanting open democracy for their people, and membership in the world’s peacekeeping community.

 

Aboard the seaQuest, Tim interrupted Captain Bridger to tell him that the Cubans needed help.   
“I’m not about to start a war with Cuba on my own, Mr O’Neil. I appreciate their plight, but this order needs to come directly from Admiral Noyce. Call him now.”   
Tim had anticipated the request, and Noyce’s face filled the screen. Despite the fact that it was midnight on the east coast of the United States, it was obvious that Bridger had not woken his friend.   
“Yes, you’re going to Cuba. Do everything you can to aid the counterrevolutionaries. Nathan, make sure you win,” the admiral said, softening his voice at the end. “If we declare war on Cuba and lose, all hell will break lose, but this could be the end of communism. Did you ever think we’d see it in our lifetimes, when we were at the naval academy all those years ago?” Bridger and Noyce had joined the navy in 1978, when schools were still holding nuclear bomb drills hiding under their desks because of the threat of nuclear bombs from the Soviet Union. The old Cold Warriors: they were a dying breed. They had both served through the Cold War, and through the War on Terror, and now into the under sea colonization era. Although most of his crew had seen the war on terror, amongst the crew of the seaQuest, only Bridger and Crocker had seen the Cold War. “Today’s the day, Bill. The day we joined the navy to see.” Bill’s face disappeared. “O’Neil! Get me that Cuban submarine!” Bridger ordered, and Benjamin’s face filled the screen.   
“This is Nathan Bridger of the UEO ship seaQuest DSV. We will be at your position in 30 minutes. Please prepare a party to come aboard and advise us on your current situation.” He spoke as officially as he could with his heart racing. 

Miguel Ortiz, the ship’s sensor chief, froze. It was a face he had not expected to see ever again; a face he had not seen since he had climbed aboard a dinghy back in 2014. He had aged considerably in the four years since he had last seen him, but that was unmistakably the face of his father. 

Captain Bridger put together a team to meet with the counterrevolutionaries as they came aboard. He named Miguel to the team, as he knew this was Miguel’s home country. “Sir, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not.”  
“Why not Mister Ortiz?” the captain asked.   
“That’s my father. We haven’t spoken since I left Cuba. He doesn’t even know I’m alive.”   
“Very well, Mister Ortiz. Mister O’Neil, you’ll take his place.”  
“Aye, captain,” both men replied, and Ortiz went back to his place monitoring the WSKRS orbiting the ship while Tim stood up and followed the captain, Commander Ford, and Mister Shan to the conference room. Everyone but the captain sat in the room and waited, while Captain Bridger went to the docking bay to meet his guests calling Chief Crocker to join him as he made his way in that direction. 

There was a chime, and then a loud groaning noise as the docking bay hatch opened revealing three men climbing up into the ship’s entrance. “Benjamin Ortiz,” the first said, “and these are my associates Mister Cruz and Mister Dias.”   
“Nathan Bridger, and my chief of security Manuel Crocker” Bridger replied, taking Benjamin’s hand. Nathan led them to the MagLev and then to the conference room where the room suddenly went quiet. Introductions were made, and everybody took a seat.   
“Tell us what we need to know,” Nathan requested.   
“When I left, the streets were on fire, and people were rebelling in the streets. Certainly by now the military has been moved in, but people were fighting with molotov cocktails and any weapons they had. We aren’t really in control at this point. There’s too much pent up anger amongst the average civilian for us to control anything.”   
“A revolution without a leader worked in Ukraine in 2014, when there was enough unrest directed at their leaders to create chaos and overthrow the government. But then Russia stepped in and annexed Crimea,” Cruz recalled. “We’d like the UEO to step in and help us to prevent things from getting worse. There are isolationist sectors who would make things worse, eliminating use of the internet and installing more rabid dictators. If they are allowed to take advantage of the chaos, we’ll have another North Korea on our hands in Cuba, and we know that’s not anything the UEO wants.”   
North Korea had recently rebelled and overthrown the Kim dynasty to join the UEO, but they were still suspect. Everyone in the country had to learn to function in the 21st century all of a sudden, and they were desperately poor which led to gangs and millions of dollars being spent trying to convince people to remain where they were instead of everyone immigrating to South Korea and leaving the country empty. Corporations had moved in to help teach people how to behave and use the internet and do just about everything else that most people took for granted. It had been a huge problem for the UEO, and no one wanted Cuba to follow in their footsteps.   
“You’re right, and we’re planning to help you. Do you have a plan?”  
Benjamin looked relieved. “Of course. We have people waiting for us to come and move on the capitol building. If we can control that, we can prevent government from reforming until we declare elections. We have no idea at this point what is waiting for us outside. It could still be chaos, or the military could have moved in and suppressed everything and arrested half the population of Havana.   
Shan interrupted, “we have someone who can find that out for us, but he’s not exactly a traditional sailor.”   
“You’re right, Mister Shan. Get me Lucas.” Shan pushed a few buttons, and Lucas’ face came up on the main screen.   
“Lucas,” Bridger started, “we need to know what’s going on in the Cuban government. Do you think you can hack into their servers and find out what the military is doing right now, and how seriously they’re taking the threat on the street?”   
“Of course, Captain. Give me an hour.”  
“Can you make it 30 minutes?”   
“It won’t be as thorough, but I can.” The teenager shut off the screen and got to work. 

Thirty minutes later, Lucas came back on the screen. “It looks like chaos, Captain. The military is revolting, and half of them are refusing to follow orders. They’re refusing orders to fire on civilians.”   
“This is even better than we hoped,” Benjamin enthused.   
“We’ll get you to the capitol, and help you hold it.” Nathan told him, “but you’ll have to find a way to calm the civilians.”   
“I think they’ll calm down when we tell them we’ll hold elections. That’s what they want, as much as it is what we want.” 

Ford put together an away team of 30 members. They put on their dessert camo uniforms, which would be worthless in the streets of Havana, but were leftover from two decades of fighting in the Middle East. The men ran through the halls of the seaQuest as though they were already in battle, and then climbed down the hatch to a shuttle craft, where they sat and waited to reach the land. Tim and Miguel were both on the same shuttle as a part of the away team along with Chief Crocker and Chief Shan. They were led by Commander Ford. It took about ten minutes for the shuttle to arrive at the dock the counterrevolutionary submarine had left late the night before. They stepped out into the hot and muggy air. The first thing they noticed was that the city was burning and people were screaming and chanting in Spanish. Miguel and Tim spoke Spanish, and Shan spoke Portuguese, which was close enough to figure out what was being said, mostly. The Cuban military, or what was left of it, seemed to be holed up around a large building with pillars surrounding it, and a statue of Che Guevara in front of it. “That’s the capitol,” Benjamin told them, unnecessarily. The seaQuest crew and the counterrevolutionaries would have to find their way through a crowd of people with spades and molotov cocktails. Long shadows creeped over everything, flickering in the pre-dawn darkness as the lights from the fires changed constantly.   
They began walking slowly towards the capitol building. Some people saw them and recognized the patches. An excited murmur of “UEO!” began circulating through the crowd. Waves of people moved out of their way to allow them through, while the military stopped harassing the group of people nearest them and instead got into a formation facing the seaQuest men, who were joined by about 70 organized counterrevolutionaries. The 100 militarized men and thousands of civilian protestors faced about 300 military members. A few of the Cuban soldiers defected upon seeing the UEO. There really was nothing Cuba could do if the UEO decided to send in a full invasion force, and everybody knew that. Everybody also knew that having committed a few forces, the UEO would do whatever it had to to ensure victory.   
The sailors began shooting, aiming for the officers. Their weapons were set to stun, but there was really no way to determine that until men started to stand up again, which, with any luck, the battle would be over before then. The Cuban military was using old fashioned AK47s, which had no similar stun function. Anyone hit by a bullet would be in grave danger. The Cubans had no intention of taking prisoners. Fortunately, they also had no intention of dying for a moribund regime, and more than half of them turned tail and ran when their own men started falling. “Let them go!” Ford ordered, and the seaQuest men did so, however, the unorganized masses grabbed them as they tried to run through, and captured them. The seaQuest was helped by the chaos as the soldiers didn’t seem to know whether to fire on them or the civilians helping them. As soon as they left the civilians alone, they found themselves being pelted with stones and larger rocks. If they targeted the civilians, the seaQuest crew and counterrevolutionaries were able to take down their men easily. Their leadership had deserted them, so they never found an appropriate way to aim or behave, and suddenly they found themselves all being marched in a line back to the seaQuest.   
Ford called for Doctor Westphalen to come and take care of the injured crew members as three of them had fallen during the attack. She came, escorted by another five men, and they carried the injured men back to the seaQuest. They stumbled and groaned their way back to medbay. Kristen took off the first man’s shirt and looked at his wound. “Were they using real guns? Those barbarians!” she said to Doctor Levin, who had joined her and was inspecting a second man’s wounds.   
“Looks like,” he said, shaking his head. He had never even seen a real gun. Since the pulse guns were invented in 2000, only a few old fashioned collectors still had guns. Firing on a person with a gun was considered a war crime, and a very serious civilian crime. Cuba hadn’t signed onto those treaties, but they would still try to try these men for war crimes, or at least they would try the officers. Most likely the rank and file would be allowed to go free. “Just following orders” hadn’t been a valid excuse for war crimes since the second world war, but it also didn’t make sense to arrest a nation’s entire supply of soldiers. 

The counterrevolutionaries and the seaQuest crew now held the capitol. Benjamin took out a bullhorn and began addressing the crowd. He promised free elections and joining the UEO, both of which drew wild cheers from the crowd. People settled down, realizing that they had to maintain control of the capitol building but no longer had to actively be fighting for it. Some began to trickle back home, as they’d been up all night and wanted to sleep. However, the majority stayed. The seaQuest crew began settling in, sitting on the steps of the capitol building. Miguel and Tim sat down with a deck of cards and started a Texas Hold’m competition, which the crew played every week in the conference room. Slowly, other crew members began to join them, playing for nothing but pride as no one had brought the chips on an away mission. Suddenly the wind gusted, and the cards in the middle of the group blew away. Miguel jumped up and chased them. A foot stepped on the cards, stopping them from blowing any further. “Thanks,” Miguel looked up. The foot belonged to Benjamin.   
“Son?” Benjamin sounded genuinely startled, and no wonder. The last time Miguel had seen his father, he had been a mere teen, and was trying to escape to the United States in a small raft with twenty other men and women. Benjamin had assumed his son had drowned in the attempt, as most rafts full of refugees did. It was what had prompted him to become a counterrevolutionary in the first place. He was seeing a ghost.   
“Father,” Miguel said, and tried to turn away.   
Benjamin grabbed him by the shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me you were alive? It is the kind of thing I would have liked to know.”   
“I didn’t want anything to do with you. I still don’t.” Miguel was intentionally rude, but his father kept his hand on his shoulder. The sensor chief pulled away and went back to his game. His life had not been great since he made it to the United States but it had certainly been better than it would have been had he stayed in Cuba. He had joined the navy almost immediately upon getting to Florida, and was now assigned to the flagship of the UEO navy.   
“What went so wrong between us that you wanted to leave the entire country to get away from me?”   
“You killed my mother!” Ortiz yelled at him.   
“I didn’t kill your mother,” Benjamin cast his eyes downward, and frowned. “The government killed your mother. I only chose to pull the life support when there was no chance she was coming back.”   
“The government?” Miguel looked uncertain, for the first time since he was a teenager.   
“They shot her, using one of their real guns. They shot her in the head and the chest. Even if she had been able to breathe, she was never going to be your mother again.”   
“But the teachers said…” he started  
“Does it surprise you that communists lie?” Benjamin interrupted.   
Miguel had learned a few things since getting to the United States, so it no longer surprised him to learn that things he had learned as a child were blatantly untrue, but he had never considered that they had lied about such an important part of his childhood. His mother had died when he was a young teen, and teachers had told him his father was responsible. He should have realized they were lying when they didn’t immediately execute his father, but they had kept him in prison for a few years until Fidel Castro died, and then had released him secretly during the night. In the intervening years, Miguel and his sister had been housed by various relatives, all of whom believed, or claimed to believe that Benjamin had murdered his wife. They believed that Benjamin had been a counterrevolutionary, which actually hadn’t been true until his release. An especially vigilant aunt tried to beat the counterrevolutionary tendencies out of Miguel with a willow branch on numerous occasions until Miguel had struck her back, and she sent him to live with an uncle who was much more sympathetic.   
Benjamin had been released from prison and Angela and Miguel returned to his care for only a week before Miguel had decided to risk everything, including his life, to run away and try a new life in America. It had always been true that thousands of people a year risked dinghies to make it the 90 miles to America, and the vast majority of them died at sea. Miguel had been lucky to survive and avoid the Coast Guard ships that patrolled the sea looking for Cubans trying to flee their home country. His father had assumed he had died when he never heard from him again. Instead, Miguel had joined the navy, and made a life for himself within the United States. He had tried to put that part of his life behind him as he started boot camp and then advanced individual training to learn to be a sensor chief.   
“Why did they kill her?” Miguel asked, almost willing to believe.   
“Your mother taught literature. She had a group of students who came over to our house weekly and read banned books. They said that she was a counterrevolutionary, and they shot her as she was walking with her students to make a point to those students that they had better not continue studying forbidden literature, and should only consume state approved media.”   
“Mama was a counterrevolutionary?” he dropped his jaw, and his eyes widened.   
“Yes.”   
While Miguel had left Cuba, his father and sister had tried to improve life for all Cubans within Cuba. They had met with a group of counterrevolutionaries who had revealed themselves when Benjamin got out of prison as they also believed the rhetoric that Benjamin had been involved with counterrevolutionary activities since they knew his wife had been. Slowly, he rose through the ranks until he was the leader of the counterrevolutionaries. He had largely kept Angela out of his activities, fearing for her safety if she were arrested as he had been. He had already survived prison; he knew he could do it again. However he also knew what it could do to a person, and he couldn’t bear to have that happen to his only surviving child. Independently, Angela had realized that the government was repressing them and that there was better out there in the UEO. She had tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to organize her peers at college to fight against the communist government. However, for the most part, she just went through her studies and tried to be a good student. She succeeded in being almost entirely unremarkable.  
Both men had started crying. Finally Miguel opened his arms to embrace his father for the first time in half his life. 

Cuba had no undersea colonies. They were afraid of colonies trying to declare independence and joining the UEO. Besides that, the UEO really controlled the technology to build colonies, and Cuba didn’t know how to do it. Vietnam had tried to invent colonies but it had backfired on them when the colonies had gained access to the internet, and rebelled, which had sparked a rebellion in the entire country, and communism had fallen in favor of joining the UEO. This pattern had been followed in almost all of the socialist countries and now Cuba was the final vanguard of socialism. They were able to successfully keep their people off the internet, except for those who had access to submarines, who were primarily counterrevolutionaries themselves. They were not able to keep news of the formation of the UEO a secret from their people, however, and to a lot of people a global system of trade and jobs sounded good. This was especially true in the poorest sectors of society. Now, those were the people throwing rocks at soldiers in the hopes that they could do anything to bring about change in their personal fortune. They wanted to compete on the world market for jobs, and that is what Benjamin promised them. 

“Captain?” Lucas called over the ship’s intercom.   
“Not now, Lucas,” Bridger replied, frantic sounding. He was monitoring the situation with his crew and three of them had been shot.   
“Now, Captain. It is important.” Lucas tried again.   
“What is it?” Bridger sounded resigned, but given that he had the boy hacking the Cuban military’s computers, it seemed possible that he had something important.   
“The Cuban military is about to torpedo the nearest undersea colony to Florida: The Sea Spine colony, and they’ll be there within ten minutes.”   
“Thank you Lucas.”

Bridger contacted Ford on the surface, “you’re going to be on your own for a bit, commander. The Cubans are moving on an undersea colony to try to make it look as though the counterrevolutionaries bombed them.”   
“Understood, sir. On my own.” Ford replied, and then went back to playing cards with the rest of the crew. 

The seaQuest had already moved towards Florida. There were only 90 miles between Havana and Florida, and although it would take an average submarine 90 minutes to move that distance, it would take the seaQuest only ten minutes. They quickly caught up with the Cuban sub. “Hail them,” Bridger ordered.  
“No response,” the night time communications officer reported. He had taken over when O’Neil had gone on the away mission.   
“Flood forward torpedo tubes, and target their propulsion systems,” he ordered, and the Lieutenant who had taken over weapons replied “aye, sir.”   
“Hail them again,” he ordered.   
“Still no response, Captain.”   
“Broadcast on emergency signals”  
“Aye captain”  
“This is Captain Nathan Bridger with the UEO ship seaQuest DSV. We will not allow you to fire on civilians at the Sea Spine colony. If you persist in your current course, we will be forced to fire upon you.”   
He waited. Ordinarily a threat of being fired upon by the UEO flagship would bring an immediate response, but the Cuban ship continued ignoring them.   
“Sir, they are targeting the colony!” the Petty Officer who had taken over for Ortiz announced with some urgency.   
“Fire,” Captain Bridger ordered, “and then get me an away team to arrest everyone on that sub.”   
They hit the sub right where they meant to: in the propulsion unit on the back end of it. As it filled with water, it sank to the bottom of the ocean, and the bridge lurched upwards. Then the entire thing settled on the bottom of the sea. Security put together a team and stormed the ship. They arrested everyone aboard, and brought them back to seaQuest where they joined the men who had been stunned during the fighting in Havana. The brig aboard seaQuest was not meant to hold this many people, and security stationed a few extra men there to contain them. 

“Alright Mr Carelton,” Bridger approached his helmsman. “Bring us back to Havana.”   
“Aye sir,” he replied, steering the ship in a large arc to head back where they had come from. 

 

Ten minutes passed uneventfully. As suddenly as the Cuban sub sank, there was chaos on the bridge. “Sir!” three different seamen yelled almost together. “Sensors?” he asked  
“The Cuban navy seems to have rallied in our absence, sir. There are dozens of small vehicles surrounding us.”   
“Several of them have targeted us,” the weapons crew member announced.  
“They can’t hurt us unless they all fire on the same spot at the same time,” Bridger reassured his crew. “Just start firing on them one at a time. Target propulsion units, and not life support units.”   
“It’s difficult with something that small to hit propulsion and not life support,” the seaman announced.   
Bridger sighed. His daytime crew could do it, but, he couldn’t expect perfection from the nighttime crew. They were all newer and less experienced than his day crew. That’s why they didn’t go on away missions, and why they primarily worked at night when nothing exciting happened.   
“Send out stingers and speeders. Gentlemen, we’re going to have a dogfight.”   
Below him, men ran towards the smaller craft. They would swarm around the seaQuest and take on the smaller vessels one on one. 

“Damn,” Bridger swore. “This is why they sent us away to Sea Spine colony. They wanted us to sink that sub and rescue those people. They knew they couldn’t get their men in the water one at a time with us in the area, so they got rid of us and then swarmed the place.” However, he couldn’t have allowed Sea Spine to be destroyed, so there wasn’t really much of a choice in what they did, even with hindsight. “Put junior on screen,” he ordered, and an image of the outside of the sub appeared. “Stabilizing,” the seaman reported, and sure enough, the image stabilized.   
“If anyone sees one of our men get in trouble, say something,” he ordered the other men on the bridge. “Everyone strap yourself in,” he added as an afterthought. “Code red.” Lieutenant Commander Hitchcock pushed a button on her station and the doors to the bridge sealed themselves, and a red light began flashing. Lucas swore and sat on his bunk. He picked up the vocoder and called for Darwin. The dolphin came to him almost immediately. He swore fish-face was just as scared of the code red as Lucas was himself. Most of the time seaQuest seemed like a safe place to live, but occasional emergencies shook the very core of that belief. 

There was no way for one man to keep up with the 100 ships in the water at this point. Bridger was depending on his night crew team being alert enough to tell him if any of his men got in trouble, so he could fire on the appropriate subs. Until then, he ordered his men to fire on anyone who looked like they were trying to take on a seaQuest sub two on one. It wasn’t dangerous work, for those who stayed aboard the seaQuest, but it was time consuming. Everyone watched the screen and yelled out coordinates when they saw one of their own men get in trouble, and then the seaQuest would quickly take action firing on the tail end of the subs, and allowing their men to finish the business. Every once in a while, the seaQuest lost one of their own dogfighters, and moved quickly to the site sending a medical team in a shuttle to pick up the downed fighters.   
Medbay was a mess. Between the sailors who had been shot in the initial fighting, a few Cuban sailors who had been injured when seaQuest sank their sub, and now the fighter pilots coming in steadily, there was almost nothing the two doctors could do to keep up. Dr Westphalen was ashamed to admit it, but her own crew got first priority, and the men from the Cuban navy would just have to wait. There wasn’t much she could do for any of them, anyway. The majority had broken limbs, or concussions, and would require casts or just to stay awake for a few more hours so they could be monitored.   
Outside, it soon became possible for two seaQuest pilots to take on one Cuban fighter fairly regularly, and it was just a mop-up job. The seaQuest continued firing on the enemy pilots as their pilots took them on in two-on-one and then three-on-one fights. It had taken about three hours, but it was over. The Cuban navy didn’t have large submarines that could go head-to-head with the seaQuest, and they were out of the smaller, faster subs that might be able to compete with seaQuest’s crew technologically, but never could on skill. They could send out some larger Soviet era submarines if they wanted to lose them all, but everyone knew you couldn’t compete with the seaQuest with the old Russian subs. World War II and Cold War era technology was all but obsolete. They weren’t stupid enough to try it. 

With the Cuban army and navy both defeated, there was little else to do but declare victory. Bridger updated Commander Ford, who called a meeting with Benjamin and Cruz, and finally, only 24 hours after Raul Castro’s death, Benjamin Ortiz declared the communist tyranny of Cuba over, and declared himself leader for 30 days, after which time there would be free and fair elections overseen by a regulatory committee from the UEO. The military commanders would be tried for shooting people with guns, and for firing on unarmed civilians. 

Bridger went down to the medbay. Kristen looked up from her computer. “We lost Mister McMahon, but the others will pull through,” she said looking at him with gentle, yet exhausted eyes.   
“We’ll get them for warcrimes.” Bridger replied. It didn’t bring his seaman back, but, it was something. He walked towards the two surviving crew members, and put his hand on one of their shoulders. “You doing alright, seaman?” he asked  
“Yes, sir” the man replied.   
“Good. If you need anything, you tell Dr Westphalen, or Mr Levin.”   
“Aye, captain” both replied.   
He handed each a chocolate bar, “don’t tell the doctor,” he told them with a wink. “My father always told me it was the best medicine.”   
Both men opened and ate their chocolate quickly.   
He walked through the rest of medbay handing out chocolates and offering support where he could. 

It was a month later, and seaQuest was monitoring the first Cuban elections since the Cold War. The socialists had put up a candidate, as had a group that wanted democracy, but to maintain their independence from the UEO. Benjamin was also running as the pro-UEO candidate. The socialists were complaining that the UEO was monitoring elections in which they clearly held a stake but in the end there was very little for the seaQuest to do. Results came in overwhelmingly for Mr Ortiz and the UEO membership. The seaQuest dropped Admiral Noyce off with Benjamin to let them make their deals together, and the crew of the seaQuest got ready to continue their peacekeeping mission. Noyce had been brought because all the independent polls had said Benjamin would win in a landslide, and despite the polling failures of Brexit and Trump in 2016, the UEO thought it prudent to show they were prepared to bring Cuba into the fold immediately.   
The UEO had arrested the highest ranking military commanders from the Cuban army and navy accusing them of firing on civilians and soldiers with bullets. This meant that Ortiz’s first move had to be reforming a military so that it could join the military of the UEO and not find itself completely requiring the UEO’s protection. The UEO would provide commanders to train some of the enlisted sailors and soldiers who would be allowed to remain in the military after going through a new boot camp to train them in how to appropriately deal with civilians. Those who had deserted during the revolution were reinstated.   
It would take another few months of negotiations, but for now, Admiral Noyce offered his hand to Benjamin Ortiz, “welcome to the UEO, Mister President.” He said.   
Benjamin took his hand, “it is my honor.”


End file.
